Commuters left stranded as fire breaks out at London Bridge station

27/11/2013

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Commuters faced chaos on their return home after a fire broke out at London Bridge station this evening.

A small fire broke out in an equipment room at London Bridge around 5pm on Tuesday afternoon. The fire led to a signalling problem which caused all services to stop for more than half an hour, according to official sources.

In a disastrous domino effect, however, services came to a halt across othermain stations in London and delays continued well into the night.

Overall an evening of chaos for commuters trying to return back home but faced with the hold-ups. Especially badly hit were those travelling south east, with all services to Hayes, Kent cancelled for hours.

Stations at London Bridge, Waterloo and Charing Cross swelled with crowds while the few services slowly resumed struggled to cope with the extra demand of passengers.

So many people travelled to Victoria as an alternative station that all trains were delayed and the tube station closed for a short time due to services reaching capacity.

“I got to Charing Cross around 19.30 and there was no service running” a young commuter told us tonight, “it was so crowded, all you could hear was people voicing their complains at the information desk or in front of the screens. There were absolutely no trains in sight, neither coming to or going from the station.”

Mr Antonioli referred to his experience at Charing Cross station tonight as “an escalation of chaos”, with all train announced as cancelled within the first 45 minutes of his stay there. The young man, trying to travel back to Lower Sydenham, south east London, described how he managed to squeeze in the first available train to Lewisham at 21.37 and finally board on the first train to Hayes at 22.38. A 3 hours journey seems to have been the average for commuter to get back to their homes in London last night.